This morning I woke up and had 200+ automated messages in my inbox telling me that _____ was following me.  I was excited because the night before, I knew that I only needed 80 more followers to hit my goal of one thousand followers in one week on Twitter.  It was a bit of a social media experiment that I set exactly a week before after talks at the last Manoa Geek Meet held at the Honolulu Advertiser.

It was a great meeting, I just felt out of the loop for not being so integrated into Twitter.  People there were using their iPhones to exchange twitter names instead of business cards and here I was marketing myself as an experienced online marketer without anymore that 10 followers on Twitter.  Granted, most of my peers on the mainland in my profession aren’t even on Twitter simply because they don’t have the bandwidth to maintain their account or get involved with a new social medium.  Also, most of them work for companies / agencies who represent Advertisers or Publishers so their is no need for them to market themselves. Lastly, many people find it hard to find the value in Twitter.

I heard somewhere that 50% of the people who sign up for Twitter abandon it.  I think that explains a lot of my friends and why they have accounts with only a few followers and no avatar.  People don’t understand the value or purpose of Twitter.  I didn’t either until my conversations with @HawaiiSEO, @exbor, and @ KGMB9 at the Manoa Geek meeting.

Let me start this tutorial by explaining that Twitter is a content stream (from my perspective).  It is a way to share useful information with users who share similar interests with you.  It isn’t about telling people what you had for breakfast or what you are watching; its about providing information that people want.   If you understand this point, you’ll be giving yourself a leg up in accumulating followers.  I mean, seriously, is your life so interesting that thousands of people want to hear about what you are doing ever hour or every few minutes for that matter?

AlohaNewMedia Twitter Stats - 1000 followers in 7 days

Before I get into the real nitty gritty of how I gained one thousand followers in one week, I want to answer the question of “why?” First, everyone says that after x many followers, you can’t even keep track of the conversation.  I agree and I’ll explain how I deal with that.  Secondly, people have said that Twitter relationships are about quality and not quantity.  I agree but there is also a lot of value in having access to the eyeballs of thousands of people who fit your target demographic.  A perfect example is that I wanted to get some traffic to my wife’s photography site so I asked my followers to re-tweet a post that promoted her site.  Just from one simple post, her site received 67 clicks.  For that reason, I feel that Twitter is a great tool for promoting sites and gauging what appeals to users within your audience.  So without further ado, let’s get you some followers!

1.  Figure out what your interests are, what you are an expert in, or who you want to meet.  This will give you direction for how to target followers.  In my case, I wanted to target anyone in Hawaii.

2.  Determine who are the authorities in your target niche’.  Its easy to determine who the top Twitter users in your chosen area are with tool like Twellow and WeFollow. Just type in a keyword to see who’s the most followed for that area.  For the Keyword ‘Hawaii’, the top Twitter accounts are people like @AlohaArleen, @HawaiiReality, @Neenz, @Hawaii, @Honadv, and @KBMB9.  All of these people I have met at either the Manoa Geek Meet or at the Social Media Chapter Meeting.  Follow the authorities in your area and build a relationship with them.   These are people you should look up to so treat them with respect.  If you do, they will follow you back.

3.  Your Twitter account will soon get out of control, so you need to create a customizable view of all the Tweets that are going to go on around you.  Basically, you will never be able to follow 100′s of user’s tweets, not to mention 1000′s or in @AlohaArleen’s case, 60,000 followers.  Use Tweet Deck to manage your conversations.  The rule here is to create groups for users that you want to pay attention to.  In my case, I’ve created a “Hawaii” group and I have added all the above names (since I want to be involved in their discussions).

4.  Start Tweeting!  Start by providing your followers with useful information and content that is relevant to them.  In my case, that’s news or stories that I found interesting.  I use sites like StumbleUpon, Alltop, and Digg to find articles.  After I find these articles, I use Adjix to shrink the link to the article and post the article.  Also, you can delay your tweets with Adjix so you can space them out or Tweet while you are asleep.  What I really enjoy about Adjix is that you can track how many users click on your link.  This will help you gauge what time of day gets the most clicks and what types of links get the most responses. You can also shrink links with Tweet Deck, but I like Adjix because you can install a button on your Firefox browser to “one-click” shrink your link and tweet it.

5.  Start following.  It’s good etiquette in Twitter land to follow anyone who is following you.  You can choose not to follow this unspoken rule, but it is a good idea to just do it yourself.  As you follow people, you will see that they start following you back.  In some cases, this is immediate with a direct message response.  Look at the message closely, chances are, it’s a canned message.  You can set up this type of automation using TweetLater.  TweetLater lets you auto-follow anyone who is following you on Twitter.  Also, you can configure TweetLater to send a Direct Message to your followers.  This is a good way to send a link to your site or promote a recent blog post.

6.  Now start mass following.  Remember to continue following steps 1-5.  Keeping those in mind, use tools like InRev TwitIn to follow 15 accounts at a time.  Follow those who are following the authorities in your niche’.  I usually follow 200-500 people per day.  Keep in mind that the Twitter API only allows for 100 request per hour so you might hit that cap if you continually add users.  Continue to provide valuable content, and people will follow you back.

7.  Consolidate and reach an equilibrium.  Un-follow anyone who isn’t following you.  You don’t want to seem like you follow everyone in the world.  Also, you don’t want to follow people who aren’t actively tweeting (remember that 50% abandon rate I mentioned earlier?). I usually do this in the morning after I’ve gone on a long Twitter Follow Frenzy. I use Twitter Karma which my friend and mentor David Zuls recommended.  Recognize that it takes several hours in some cases for automation to auto-follow.  Also, not everyone is an avid Twitter user like you, so you might want to give them some extra time to follow you.  Bottom line is that communication is a two way street and if they aren’t following you, they aren’t going to be able to hear what you are saying (so stop listening to them).

8.  Repeat.  Keep doing this every day for a week and see where it gets you.  Be sincere and be yourself.  Don’t spam people and re-tweet your message 30 times in 2 minutes.  Don’t sound like a car salesman trying to make his quota on Dec. 30th.  Just be genuine, provide useful or interesting content, and try to make the community a better place.  There’s a feel good aspect of Twitter where people really go out of their ways to help one another.  Try it, it might make your day.

If all goes well, you’ll have a graph showing this type of progress over 7 days (see above).  Just today alone, I added over 350 followers.  The more you gain, the more people follow you.  So it does get easier.  I’m going to keep it up and try to gain another 1000 by next week using the above methods.  Be sure to keep track of your group you set in Tweet Deck and contribute often.

Keep Tweeting, be sure to follow me and retweet my post, and ask me or comment if you have questions or something to add.  Finally, if you are or know a business who is in need of online marketing services, please do not hesitate to contact me.  Please let me know your results in the comment section below.

Our friends over at Plug in SEO wrote a quick review on this tool and included a video (for all you visual learners like myself).  You can use its basic features for free as well as advanced options ($) for changing titles and counting feeds etc.  Great little tool for creating a feed from a site that doesn’t support RSS.  When I saw this, a little light went on in my head (there’s a first).

Using RSS for SEO hasn’t been adopted widely, partly due to the difficulty of generating feeds from database tables and back office systems. Whilst blogs and some content management systems (CMS) provide feed support out-of-the-box, enterprise adoption has been slow.

Feedity allows a web page to serve as the feed source. It handles the conversion to RSS once it knows the HTML blocks it should look for on a page.

Using RSS/Atom Feeds for SEO

Where feeds can aid your SEO efforts is by syndicating your frequently updated content to other sites to stimulate inbound links, pinging crawlers to increase their visit rate, and making it easy for customers to keep up-to-date with what they’re interested in- equalling more repeat visits.

Feedity Introduces Feeds to Your Site

Feedity is very simple as it only allows linked item titles to be returned. A rich, engaging feed generally contains more than a single sentence title- it incorporates a description with images and multiple links to hook the reader into visting your site.

Additionally, as the feed is based on your HTML any code change could break the feed. These limitations shouldn’t rule out its use however.

Where Feedity is immensely useful is allowing you to trial feeds without the up-front investment in the feed server software development, installation and infrastructure. Once it proves its worth then develop richer, deeper feeds.

Verdict

A great way to get feeds up on your site fast, trialling them for SEO and customer experience.

Here’s a great read from a fellow SF consultant.  He really took the time to site his resources.  I connect with this post because the author elaborates on how SEO is the the union of technology and marketing which has typically been two completely different personality types in the work place:

Technology and marketing were formerly unique disciplines with very different types of people. SEO’s are the folks in between. In my mind, the reason SEO goes well beyond just search marketing into most areas of business is because search engine marketing IMPACTS many of the decisions that are made in a business. Marketing, infrastructure, customer relations, analytics, accounting, human resources can all directly impact search marketing and vice versa. SEO has become more and more of a strategic vision as top rankings become more competitive, and more valuable. SEO is in large part the communication gap between marketing and IT, combined with top level executive strategy (The only good SEO’s that leave the field at this point, do so to become CEO’s – visual illustration).

This excerpt brings me back to my days at LeapFrog toys when I was trying to “play nice” with the marketing ladies as I represented the engineering team.  That was an experience that definitely grew hair on my chest.

If you are interested in learning more about SEO, this is a good article.  Probably an SEO 201 level read.  Good luck, and let me know your opinion.

Working as a Product Manager at an online start-up was a fortunate opportunity (challenging but good).  I wore many hats and became a “jack of all trades” when it came to gaining widespread distribution online (with the exception of organic search) .  Basically, any online channel that my former company could spend money on, I got involved in.  Developing successful products and business units required these various channels and Search was essential.

In 2005, the company I was working for had established very close relationships with Google, Yahoo!, MIVA, etc.  These relationships were a function of their online spends; we spent a lot on PPC (Paid search).  The internal search team was comprised of about fifteen employees. Despite all the money that was being spent on the media buys and resourcing the team, and despite the money that was being generated, there was no natural search effort in the company whatsoever.  I guess I never questioned why back then, I just considered it was a “Dark Art” and something that only a few select individuals broke the code on.

Three companies later, I had still never met anyone who had strong natural search experience.  SEO/SEM companies were on the other side of the fence from Lead Generation companies in most cases.  Challenged by my executive team telling me that “…we just can’t do natural search,” and “…leave SEO to the search companies,” I began examining the few companies in the Lead Gen space that did SEO.  I contacted former co-workers and associates who went to work at these and other large SEO firms  (iCrossing and iProspect to name a few).  I interviewed search consultants who tried to sell me on the secret marketing tactics involved with SEO without being able to elaborate on anything past what I read on Google.  I burned the midnight oil sifting through articles on SEO and finally started to optimize my own sites as case studies.

After a few successes, I quickly realized that there is no secret sauce, no magic spell, no Jedi mind trick that you can perform to rank your site over another.  Granted, there are Black Hat techniques for short term gains, but those end up hurting a business in the long run and are not sustainable (watch out for anyone who says they can get you instant traffic). In online marketing, when Google changes their algorithm, you know it; companies who aren’t playing by the rules stop delivering traffic.  All the techniques that anyone needs to know about how to organically rank have been blogged about on thousands of websites.  Not to mention, Google has done everything but provide their actual algorithm on their site between their forum and webmaster tools.

I could easily sell the idea to my clients that SEO is a secret art and takes years to learn, but why would I want to start out a business relationship by lying?  Optimizing a site could be as simple as adding a few internal links and keywords or it can be as involved as re-coding an entire site.  After the site is bot friendly, the rest is up to how you link to and from the site.

What I am getting at is that I’m not afraid to reveal to my clients the steps they need to take to make their site search engine friendly because there’s so much more to ranking than how you code your site.  If my client managed to code their site correctly, then they saved us both a lot of time and energy. We can now focus our time and resources into driving traffic via other distribution channels which will only further promote the site’s natural ranking.  SEO is only one tool in an online marketers tool box and should be viewed as such.

To those new to online marketing, do your research.  If you don’t have time to research, be cautious how you spend your marketing dollar (This is a given considering the current economic state).   Don’t put all your eggs into the basket of a self proclaimed SEO expert.  Don’t buy into anyone who can guarantee the #1 slot on google or instant traffic to your site – these are all signs of unscrupulous search practices.

Excerpt from Google:

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.

Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do. Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or “throwaway” domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it’s best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to “help” you.

Well, its official!  I have decided to move away from the mainland and leave the hustle and bustle of San Francisco to pursue my dream of living in paradise.  I’ve learned a great deal about all areas of online marketing while working in SF, arguably  the  new media capital of the World.  I hope to take my knowledge of online lead generation and brand advertising, through SEO / SEM, e-mail, CPC / CPM media buying, and viral and social media campaigns to Honolulu and apply it to the needs of local businesses on the islands.

My goal is to forge strong long term business relationships with my clients by helping their companies grow.  I strive to educate my customers about the different channels and technologies within the online space.  Unlike many of the other self-proclaimed “Online Marketers” out there, I have a long professional track record of successfully executing multi-tier strategic campaigns for the largest online advertisers in the US such as University of Phoenix, Netflix, The US Army, and Blockbuster.com.

In a nutshell, I leverage my experiences to simplify, devise, and deploy an overall custom marketing strategy for each of my clients.  Following this first post, I will elaborate on some of my experiences from the past six years as well as share articles and references that I have found useful.  Finally, I will include new topics and articles to keep my readers informed of the latest trends and technologies driving online advertising and new media today.  I hope you enjoy the read, and as always, please do not hesitate to contact me or leave a comment.

Aloha,

Ryan Hohnbaum